Greetings, Doomworld forums! To cut straight to the chase, I'd like to present the Heretic Minor Sprite Fixing and Widescreen-Friendly Project, created in much the same fashion as my Doom 2 project.

The three main goals of this endeavor are as follows:
1. Adjusting sprite offsets - This comprises the bulk of the project. This is meant to provide smoother and more consistent visuals during animations, when switching between different states, and between rotations. Additionally, some sprite offsets were shifted slightly upwards to avoid the sunken underground look.
2. Small image edits - There are a number of trivial errors found in Heretic's sprites. These mainly consist of transparent pixels or visible garbage pixels that were overlooked. If I could conclusively identify the issue as being an error and the fix would be as minimally intrusive as possible, I went ahead and made the edit to the sprite.
3. Making the graphics widescreen-friendly - For those running source ports with widescreen resolutions, you've likely noticed that some sprites cut off abruptly near the sides of the screen as they were only intended to be seen in a 4:3 aspect ratio. This pack extends these sprites so you can enjoy all of that extra viewing area without impediment. Credit goes to one Neoworm for creating most of these new graphics.

As for how to use it, this WAD in its current state works with limit-removing ports. However, vanilla heretic.exe compatibility simply requires some DeuSF work. With that in mind, you can pretty much use this WAD with any other level or mod as I can't imagine any conflicts. Simply run it with the lowest priority in the add-on hierarchy. Most newer source ports have an autoload feature, so I recommend using that.

Note: The sprite fixes and widescreen-friendly graphics are split into two WAD files. This is meant to provide compatibility with the original Heretic executable as the widescreen graphics will cause the engine to crash. Anyone using source ports (most everyone, I'd imagine) should load both WAD files at the same time.

Sample of some of the fixes: (clickable thumbnail) (clickable thumbnail)

This project is still very much a work-in-progress. I'm open to feedback on the current release as well as potential ideas for further changes.

This is the only blue pixel present in all of the Gargoyle's sprites. It's also not visible in any of the other pain rotations, so it's certainly an inconsistency.

However, I have reason to believe beyond a reasonable doubt that this is a bona fide error. I was pondering how a blue pixel could have come about when I later noticed a bunch of similarly inexplicable purple pixels of different shades (an important bit) in one of the Gargoyle's gibbing frames. How could blue and purple pixels appear when the Gargoyle's sprites adhere to a mostly warm red color palette entirely devoid of those colors?

The answer seems pretty simple: I posit that Raven used a pure blue color (0,0,255 RGB) to represent the transparent background in their sprites. When their artist was drawing the Gargoyle sprites, which is among the several monsters to have been created from scratch rather than rendered from a model, the artist accidentally used some non-opaque brushes when applying his reds. Hence, partially transparent red on blue can result in differing shades of purple or a slightly off-blue if the red was almost fully transparent, as is the case with the "tear".

NightFright said:
I take it you will also issue a fix for Hexen to complete everything (I dunno if Strife requires any changes, though)?

Hexen is still on my mind, but that game is going to be a far larger endeavor than Doom 2 or Heretic proved to be. The biggest issue with Hexen is the many first person weapon sprites that need to be made widescreen-friendly. I've already collected the extended weapon graphics that some people have made, but the most difficult weapons still remain, namely the Fighter's arsenal. I can try to cobble together something suitable, but realistically, it's going to be a great deal of work. Any release is still a long ways off.

Strife is also a slight possibility, but I'm even less familiar with Strife than I am with Heretic or Hexen.

You know this project actually interests me in playing Heretic again, I didn't try properly playing through it a second time after the first go, also since I now finally have the complete version I can consider playing through the the extra two episodes also.

Heh, I noticed this kind of problem while playing the original Doom 3: Mr. Smiley Head's Safari with prboom-plus (it's a v1.2 IWAD, so Chocolate Doom doesn't like using it directly). Anyway, the "chook" weapon (rocket launcher) has the sprite cut off in a really noticeable way. I'm surprised that port doesn't have an option to render the game in a centered 4:3 screen area bordered by black bars. Or maybe it does and I missed it. Damn those crazy long PrBoom config sections! ;-)

The new and redrawn portions and offsets of the weapon sprites in that pack aren't quite as faithful to the original art as I have been targeting, but I think most of it can serve as a useful base. I have been dragging my feet for much too long on the Hexen project to be so pedantic. Thanks for informing me about these sprites.

In the mean time, though, I do plan to release two relatively small updates to my Heretic and Doom sprite fixes which should largely finalize those two projects.